The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced that NIU Libraries has been awarded $348,920 under their Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program for the Tousey Project. This effort seeks to digitize and preserve the dime novels published by Frank Tousey, the most prolific publisher of the format, and is being undertaken in collaboration with Villanova University, Stanford University, Bowling Green State University, and Oberlin College and Conservatory. Partners will digitize a total of 4,218 dime novels and story papers, containing 93,632 pages, between 2022 and 2024.
Although his output is tame by modern standards, Tousey was one of the most controversial publishers of the 19th century, earning a reputation for stories that were more lurid and more sensational than anything put out by his competitors. While these rivals were exaggerating the high moral tone of their “family” publications, he abandoned all pretext and was the first to pitch almost exclusively to the lowest common denominator: young boys. The stories he published featured teenage inventors, detectives, plucky entrepreneurs, and bandits, including the first science fiction hero, Frank Reade, and the outlaw Jesse James.
Long dismissed by scholars as the lowest class of working class fiction, because they were written for children, there has recently been an effort to engage more critically with these novels in an attempt to understand what they might be able to tell us about evolving cultural and social mores, as well as the development of popular fiction and children’s culture.
This project builds directly on the recently completed Albert Johannsen Project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the ongoing Street & Smith Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which have already digitized over 10,000 dime novels. In addition to making thousands of these publications freely and widely available for the first time anywhere in over a century, the project will also add index entries for every story, series, and author to the online dime novel bibliography at dimenovels.org, which will be used to aggregate digital dime novel holdings across each institution.
The Tousey Project is partially funded through the NEH’s special initiative, A More Perfect Union, which will help Americans commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 by exploring, reflecting on, or telling the stories of our quest for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable society throughout our history.
More information about the NEH grants awarded.
